An embodiment relates generally to vehicle-to-vehicle communications.
In vehicle-to-vehicle communications (V2V), vehicles are equipped with wireless radio interfaces which they use to communicate with one another. An objective of a V2V network is to enable driver assistance safety applications such as emergency electronic brake light (EEBL) or blind spot warning (BSW) applications. V2V safety applications rely on wireless communications for exchanging useful information that pertain to driving conditions. Exchanged information relied upon includes kinematical information (e.g., the motion of objects without consideration of the forces producing the motion such as mass and force), road condition information, and even traffic information. The information is processed to determine whether warnings or advisories should be conveyed to the driver of the vehicle to enable the driver to make appropriate driving maneuvers. Drivers are expected to make use of the warnings/advisories and act upon such warnings/advisories received from the V2V system, in a similar manner as reacting to turn signals or brake lights of cars ahead of them, or warning signals displayed on a side of the road. As a result, it is imperative to ensure the integrity/correctness of the information exchanged and provided to the driver by the V2V system.
The traditional network security approach to verify the transmitted information is to append signatures or authentication tags to each message that is exchanged using V2V wireless communications, and use only those messages to generate alerts whose signature or authentication tag is verified to be valid. While this approach can ensure the authenticity of the information that V2V safety applications act upon, it leaves open the issue of how a vehicle is expected to authenticate and process messages given its limited computational resources.
In contrast to workstation computer systems or notebook computers which are computationally capable and have large storage capabilities, automotive computing platforms are commonly equipped with limited computational and storage capabilities. These limited computational and storage resources need to be allocated to messages in accordance with their urgency. Current approaches used in vehicles that include first-in first-out fail to appreciate the urgency of the data being authenticated. Other approaches such as assigning deadlines to messages or demanding verification of specific messages, may lead to improvement in performance, but it is not clear whether the assigned deadlines or the requested verifications are feasible. These approaches may lead to exploitation by attackers crafting bogus messages that would attract urgent deadlines.
Given a vehicle with a limited amount of computational resources, a vehicle may not be able to track all the vehicles from which it receives messages with equally high accuracy. The processing strategies and the security layer need to work with the limited amount of storage and computational capability that is available. Secondly, with respect to neighboring vehicles, it may be necessary to assign them priorities based on their relative impact on the host vehicle. Further, vehicles and the communication network within a V2V communication system are resource limited as the communication network typically has a limited bandwidth. Therefore, processing strategies and the security layer need to be sensitive to the availability or lack of information from respective sending vehicles. Lastly, the processing strategy and security layer need to be resilient to computational Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks whereby its resources may be overwhelmed by processing bogus packets.